1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to mobile devices, and more particularly to providing Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD)-like features in a wireless network.
2. Description of Related Art
Typically, a cellular phone customer is constrained by the number of airtime minutes he or she subscribes to each month. This bucket of minutes will be used for various purposes such as making outgoing calls, receiving incoming calls, and accessing customer service features via their cellular phone. Although, the customer may exceed their bucket of minutes provided by their service plan, the cost per minute in excess of the minutes provided by the service plan is usually quite high. Therefore, customers prefer to keep usage within their bucket of minutes.
On occasion, the customer may need to access customer service features via their cellular phone. For example, the customer may want to check the number of minutes used and remaining in their service plan for the month, determine if their last payment was received, or retrieve a voicemail password. In some instances, obtaining this information requires the customer to call customer service and talk to a live operator. Disadvantageously, this call to customer service will deplete the number of available minutes on the service plan, and may take several minutes to complete. A further disadvantage, from the service providers prospective, is that the service provider must employ a sufficient amount of customer service representatives to handle all the customer service calls. Alternatively, if there are not enough customer service representatives, the customer may be forced to hold for a long period of time. This hold time will further deplete the number of available airtime minutes from the service plan, and may cause the customer to be unsatisfied by the experience.
A possible solution is to automate some of the customer service calls. Thus, the customer may call into customer service and navigate through numerous audio menus to reach the service they desire. Alternatively, the customer may be required to scroll and navigate through numerous graphical menus on their cellular phones display. In both situations, the minutes from the service plan are being used once the customer initiates the customer service call.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method for providing automated customer service features which eliminate the use of a large amount of airtime minutes. There is a further need to provide USSD-like features in a wireless network.